Your skin has many “functions.” There
are holes. Entrances and exits. There are tricks, e.g., eyes which
can be opened or shut. Tongues which play hide and seek. As a youth,
you experience that this skin grows, and that you expand, and as
you expand physically so you hear that you are growing “up.” In
mind and heart, as well.
The most shuddering discovery of
skin is when you learn its spiritually intimate erotic linkage to
sex. You learn that your genitals allow you physical
entrance into another, wherein you have an experience like no other!
You grasp that these male “outties” and female “innies” are more
than appendages of physical sense. They are more
than simple interior probes. Yes, they probe the interior
like no other part of the skin, but they seem specially
attuned to mutual embrace. At the same time, you experience
a vulnerability like never before, as if the Other
could skin you alive!
You sense that they see through you,
that “You’ve gotten under my skin!”
As Earthfolk know so well, when you make present your
precious intimacy with another and so touch preciousness and so first
spy the possibility of Belovedness, the Warrior's
Quest shadow also looms large. The potential for
abuse, physical, mental and spiritual is readily obvious. Like Adam
and Eve, you sense that your intimacy is so personal that to bring
it into public light is to feel shame. Shame, here,
is a good sense. Yes, making present your shadow is good and healthy.
You don’t want to be controlled by it, so you respect it. Humorously,
so many men—when they experience the “petit mort” for
the first time—speak of feeling like a babe in the arms of
their lover. For the Warrior's Quester, such a feeling of tenderness
and of being back in the womb is, itself, an evil thought and temptation.
They deny these tendernesses and cover their feelings with acts of
Domination, that is, of sexual abuse, verbally and physically.
Continue—Skin
